英语论文网

ses taunt "Fuck you Ice Cube" as he raps his radical rant. Ice-T is probably the most macho of all. He constantly evokes his own name, sometimes embellished with the refrain, "Ice, motherfucking T." He presents himself as the "baddest motherfucker around" ("I'm as hard as they come"), taunting the cops or anyone else to try to fuck with him and his guns. In "Mic Contract," he brags: "Violent? yeah, you could call me that. Insane? you're on the right track." While he draws an extended parallel between the microphone and gun as symbols of power, Ice-T wants us to know he really lives the life of crime; indeed, this "cop killer" wants to distinguish himself from pseudo-tough rappers to claim the mantle of "O.G., Original Gangster." Thus, in much rap music, "black pride" mutates into overweening hubris and machismo taken to absurd ext remes. It quickly becomes clear that many rappers only condemn violence when it is directed against them; otherwise, they celebrate it, internalize it, and embrace it as an ethos and means of self expression. In fact, during the mid to late-1990s, violent episodes between East Coast and West Coast rappers erupted in response to members of each group dissing other groups, translating the violence of the music into violent acts. In November 1994, West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur was shot and wounded in New York, claiming he was set up by, among others, Randy "Stretch" Walker, a producer employed with East Coast rival rap firm Bad Boy Entertainment. Exactly one year later, Walker was murdered gang-execution style in his Queens, New York, neighborhood. Next, a member of the Bad Boy group shot and killed an employee of West Coast Death Row records and while shooting a video in New York, shots were fired at the West Coast Dogg Pound group in a drive-by shooting (In These Times, July 22, 1996: 24). Then, Tupac was shot to death in Los Vegas in September 1996 in a gangstyle drive-by shooting, followed by the execution of the Notorious B.I.G., a star of the N.Y.-based Bad Boy Entertainment. [11] During the mid to late-1990s, the East/West "war" thus exploded into violence, carried out in rap music, Internet exchanges with members of each side dissing the other, shootings, and gangstyle executions. In the early rap classic "The Message," Grandmaster Flash suggests that "You grow up in the ghetto/living second rate/and your eyes will sing a song of deep hate," but this hardly excuses reproducing violence and failing to seek positive alternatives. One could add to this that the "gangsta" identity is often nothing but a promotional image constructed because it sells. Dr. Dre, for example, tells how he started off as an R&B artist and admitted he's only in it for the money, and M.C. Hammer helped resurrect his career with a gangster pose. In fact, market demands for ever more shocking and provocative products reward the most extreme excess, leading some rappers to complain that they have to play the gangster game and make their work ever more shocking in order to sell and have it distributed. By the late 1990s, however, there was such revulsion against the excesses of gangster rap that even members of the "hardcore" were seeking new directions. By 1993, the conventions of G-rap music and style were so exaggerated and over the top that Rusty Cundieff could produce a hilarious satire of its pretensions and eccentricities in the film Fear of a Black Hat. The real-life violence erupting constantly in rap culture, its sexism